Quayle's Job Training Act: Does It Work?

September 30, 1988|By Neal R. Peirce, Washington Post Writers Group

Tune into the vice presidential debate Wednesday and you're sure to see GOP nominee Dan Quayle again hail his role in writing the federal job legislation of the '80s: the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA).

But how good a piece of legislation is it?

In the checkered history of federal training programs for the disadvantaged and minorities, JTPA is a standout public-relations success.

Replacing the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, which went down amid charges of scandal and boondoggle, JTPA has been able to place hundreds of thousands of youths in jobs each year. Instead of putting people into ''make-work'' employment, it functions through state governments and business-led local private industry councils that are supposed to know real employment needs and opportunities.

But is the program as good as it sounds? At $3.7 billion a year, its budget falls far below CETA's annual $9 billion. From the start, critics have said JTPA's performance figures are juiced up by ignoring the hard-core unemployed by signing up people who need the least training and would most likely land a job anyway.

Rep. Augustus Hawkins, D-Calif., who worked on a first draft of JTPA, complains that only one of 20 eligible job seekers gets funded under JTPA and that its quality is spotty with haphazard, short-term funding and lack of follow-up.

Quayle has claimed ''around 70 percent'' of JTPA's graduates land jobs. In fact, only half the enrollees end up on payrolls. Another 25 percent go back to school or are claimed as successes for learning ''work awareness'' or mastering ''effective non-verbal communications with others.''

The fact is this country still has millions of ill-trained, ill-prepared youth -- black, Hispanic and poor white. Their continued joblessness, in the face of the national prosperity of which the Republicans boast, is a prime social scandal of our time. It means we're discarding a vast reservoir of human potential, incurring immense costs for welfare and criminal justice, and undermining our international competitiveness.

The tough question Quayle should answer is whether JTPA's tokenism and ''once-over-lightly-ism'' predicts for us how a Bush-Quayle administration would deal with America's tough social problems. Should we expect four years of brave P.R. talk but halfway action?

The first clue might be how Quayle now proposes to change (or not change) JTPA. The Labor Department's inspector general reported earlier this year that the program's track record of placing trainees in permanent jobs and increasing their wages ''is not encouraging'' and that half of the participants who had been ''placed'' in jobs weren't there four months later. Another disturbing finding: Sixty percent of the employers contacted indicated that they would have trained JTPA participants on their own.

So far Quayle has been loath to acknowledge JTPA's shortcomings, or talk about expanding and toughening the program so that it comes closer to the root of chronic youth unemployment in America. Will Quayle be willing to tackle the next, critical problems, as JTPA unfolds? That's the critical issue now.